Oscar winner Adrien Brody to play Harry Houdini in miniseries on History channel in September

Oscar winner Adrien Brody will play illusionist Harry Houdini in a two-part miniseries set to air on History on Sept. 1 and 2.

"Houdini" will chart the rise of the world-famous performer, who got his start performing with his brother on Coney Island in the 1890s and became a headline act around the globe before dying in Detroit after an unexpected series of abdominal punches from a fan.

Kristen Connolly will play Houdini's wife, Bess, and Evan Jones will play Jim Collins, Houdini's assistant. The film will also look at Houdini's friendship with Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle.

Uli Edel, whose movie "The Baader Meinhof Complex," was nominated for an Oscar in the foreign-language film category, directed the miniseries from a script by Nicholas Meyer, who once wrote his own Sherlock Holmes pastiche, "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution."

For those who can't wait to see Brody's interpretation, here's Ken Marino as Houdini and Alfred Molina as Arthur Conan Doyle in a scene from the first episode of Comedy Central's "Drunk History." Same subject matter with a slightly different take and dirtier language.

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